A creative retirement : art from Mrs Summerhouse

For some time in this blog, Mrs Summerhouse has had a presence, sometimes shadowy with a passing reference, and, at other times, right at the front of operations with her occasional blogs on yoga. She teaches a yoga class every Tuesday night here in Headingley. She is a woman of many talents and one of these talents – her art – has featured before albeit infrequently. We have decided, at least as an experiment, to remedy this by giving her a regular spot in these pages. Future blogs will feature her art. Where my ‘talent’ lies in writing blogs, hers is in her art – painting, drawing, watercolours, pastels (with which we begin), printing and more recently, stained glass, which was the topic of two of these blogs.

In her retirement life Mrs SH had expected to have plenty of time to devote to her various artistic areas, alas it has not proved to be so. Truth be told, she’s been less productive since she retired than when she was working 3 days a week. Those of you who follow our adventures in this blog will have an idea of why this might be. So, we decided she needed an incentive to start to be creative again. This blog has served me well as a vehicle for my writing ambitions. It’s great, freed from any concerns about whether what I write is commercially viable – the main concern for any publisher – I have had the licence to write pretty much whatever I damn well please. Mrs Summerhouse had a website some time ago entitled Yorkshire Dales Art but, after 3 or 4 years of not selling enough through it to justify the admittedly small expense of keeping it going (annual fees and paying our IT guy), we decided to do away with it. She sold more through local contacts than she ever did through the big wide world of the internet. As proof she has an organiser of the Nidd (short for Nidderdale) Art Trail chasing her at this very moment trying to persuade her to use our barn as a temporary gallery as she once did. To be honest it was a lot of work to open the barn for two days. She provided tea, cake, wine which people enjoyed, and of course there was the view, worth a visit for this alone even without the art. As a selling strategy it was less successful.

Anyway I digress, what I was saying that she feels she needs an incentive to get working again and a blog a month (the current idea) featuring a new image, freed, like me, from the evils of commercial viability, might be just the ticket. Each one is likely to be of Nidderdale (where is our winery and barn) or surrounding area and there will be a few words to go with each image. It will be good to be using my very expensive camera, bought with a view to making the original art works into prints (this is what we sold or rather didn’t sell through the website), rather than it sitting on my desk looking at me and increasing my guilt, something I already have plenty of.

So, in this blog, I’m going to start off by publishing some of our favourite images (below) from the past few years. If you like them I know for a fact, that Mrs SH would welcome any feedback you care to send.

PS. I put this blog together on Wednesday and Mrs SH is up in the attic creating as I do this pleasant task, of course we have Wednesdays free now.